Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania / Edition 1

by Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, Bj rn Enge Bertelsen

Overview

Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782385394
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	11/01/2014
Pages:	414
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland is a historian with UiB Global at the University of Bergen. Beginning in 1999, she was part of a team of historians writing a history of Norwegian development aid, published in three volumes in 2003. She initiated the research project “In the Wake of Colonialism” and is the author of Nordmenn i det koloniale Kenya (Spartacus, 2010) and co-editor, with Knut Mikjel Rio, of Kolonitid: Nordmenn på eventyr og big business i Afrika og Stillehavet (Scandinavian Academic Press, 2009).

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His articles have appeared in Journal of Southern African Studies, Social Analysis, Anthropology Today, and Urban Studies. He is the author of Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (Berghahn Books, 2015, Open Access) and co-editor of Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval with Bruce Kapferer (Berghahn Books, 2009).
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface
Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland

List of Contributors

Introduction: Norwegians Navigating Colonial Orders in Africa and Oceania: an Introduction
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Chapter 1. Swedish and Norwegian Shipping to South Africa 1850-1914
Knut M. Nygaard

Chapter 2. Long Haul Tramp Trade and Norwegian Sailing Ships in Africa, Australia and the Pacific, 1850-1920: Captain Haave’s Voyages
Gustav Sætra

Chapter 3. Liminal but Omnipotent: Thesen & Co. – Norwegian Migrants in the Cape Colony
Erlend Eidsvik

Chapter 4. Business Communication in Colonial Times: The Norway-East Africa Trading Company in Zanzibar 1895-1925
Anne K. Bang

Chapter 5. ‘Three Black Labourers Did the Job of Two Whites.’ African Labourers in Modern Norwegian Whaling
Dag Ingemar Børresen

Chapter 6. The Consular Affairs Issue and Colonialism
Svein Ivar Angell

Chapter 7. Norwegian Shipping and Landfall in the South Sea in the Age of Sail
Edvard Hviding

Chapter 8. Adventurous Adaptability in the South Sea: Norwegians in ‘the Terrible Solomons’, ca. 1870-1930
Edvard Hviding

Chapter 9. Norwegians in the Cook Islands: The legacy of Captain Reinert G. Jonassen (1866-1915) – Trader, Musician, Navigator, Diplomat and Good Samaritan
Jon Tikivanotau Michael Jonassen

Chapter 10. From Adventure to Industry and Nation-making: The History of a Norwegian Sugar Plantation in Hawai‘i
Knut M. Rio

Chapter 11. Scandinavians in Colonial Trading Companies and Capital-intensive Networks: The Case of Christian Thams
Elsa Reiersen

Chapter 12. Colonialism in Norwegian and Portuguese: The Plantation Madal in Mozambique
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Chapter 13. Norwegian Investors and Their Agents in Colonial Kenya
Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland

Chapter 14. Scandinavian Agents and Entrepreneurs in the Scramble for Ethnographica during Colonial Expansion in the Congo
Espen Wæhle

Afterword
Peter Vale

Index

Editorial Reviews

“Navigating Colonial Orders provides a novel prism in which to examine the informal imperial influence of ‘noncolonial colonials’, both European and non-European, who thrived in foreign imperial systems. While the work resists the generalising ‘shade’ of globalisation, the contributions illuminate the global nature of expanding social, economic and political exchanges that shape contemporary core–periphery interaction. Norwegian entrepreneurs in Africa and the Pacific, utilising expertise in shipping, management, whaling and timber, flourished in an environment of rapid industrialisation and vast economic exploitation. Navigating Colonial Orders proves that Norwegians were ‘integral to and complicit in’ the feeding frenzy of European colonial expansion.” · Journal of Pacific History

“This collection is an extremely informative and valuable addition to the field of Scandinavian colonialism studies and colonial history of Africa and the South Pacific illustrating the multiform and complex nature of the colonial systems.” · Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

“This fascinating and deeply engaging volume makes a unique contribution not only to the study of Norwegian political and economic history from 1850 to 1950 but also to the interdisciplinary field of Postcolonial Studies. Through original and ground-breaking research, the contributors question the perception that Norway’s active role in the world at large came into being only in the modern era as a promoter of world peace and human rights… A counter-intuitive scrutiny of such popular assumptions through rigorous research – as the contributors to this volume have done – is of tremendous relevance to broader critical interrogations of the overlapping concepts of Nordic norm entrepreneurship and Nordic exceptionalism.” · Scandinavian Journal of History

“Navigating Colonial Orders is an extremely valuable record of geographically extensive and variously troubled and profitable Norwegian overseas adventures, enterprise and community from 1850 to 1950. Collated in a single, compelling collection, a series of painstakingly researched chapters by thirteen accomplished scholars examines Norwegian commerce, shipping, whaling, fishing, farming and forestry in Africa and the Pacific Islands….The presentations draw from an impressive range of primary archival material and secondary library material, and on the expertise of anthropologists, historians, a geographer and a political scientist.” · Gordon Pirie, University of Cape Town

From the Publisher